Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 2, 2006

Image 1of/4

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 4

(B1) trans-california ramble

(B1) trans-california ramble

Image 2 of 4

-

-

Photo: Michael Maloney

Image 3 of 4

MUIRWALK_023_MJM.jpg
Peter and Donna Thomas checked the Fremont area on a scouting trip discovering that the Bay Trail abruptly ends in places leaving them to improvise with an alternative route.
On March 27, 1868, John Muir arrived by steamer in San Francisco from New York, and almost immediately decided to take a little stroll -- to Yosemite Valley. Now, Peter and Donna Thomas, a husband-and-wife artist couple from Santa Cruz plan to follow more or less in Muir's footsteps. Muir took the ferry to Oakland and walked via the Santa Clara Valley, over the Pacheco Pass, across the San Joaquin Valley to Snelling, and then up the foothills through Coulterville to arrive in Yosemite Valley. The Thomas' start April 2 on a 300-mile route, altered from Muir's path where necessary to get around all the freeways and other manmade obstacles he didnt have to worry about. Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle on 3/22/06 in Fremont,CA less

MUIRWALK_023_MJM.jpg
Peter and Donna Thomas checked the Fremont area on a scouting trip discovering that the Bay Trail abruptly ends in places leaving them to improvise with an alternative route.
On March 27, ... more

Photo: Michael Maloney

Image 4 of 4

MUIRWALK_003_MJM.jpg
Navigating through congested metropolitan areas will present a challenge to the Thomas' unlike the open landscape Muir had in 1868.
On March 27, 1868, John Muir arrived by steamer in San Francisco from New York, and almost immediately decided to take a little stroll -- to Yosemite Valley. Now, Peter and Donna Thomas, a husband-and-wife artist couple from Santa Cruz plan to follow more or less in Muir's footsteps. Muir took the ferry to Oakland and walked via the Santa Clara Valley, over the Pacheco Pass, across the San Joaquin Valley to Snelling, and then up the foothills through Coulterville to arrive in Yosemite Valley. The Thomas' start April 2 on a 300-mile route, altered from Muir's path where necessary to get around all the freeways and other manmade obstacles he didnt have to worry about. Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle on 3/22/06 in Fremont,CA less

MUIRWALK_003_MJM.jpg
Navigating through congested metropolitan areas will present a challenge to the Thomas' unlike the open landscape Muir had in 1868.
On March 27, 1868, John Muir arrived by steamer in San ... more

On March 27, 1868, the 30-year-old John Muir arrived by steamer in San Francisco from New York, and almost immediately decided to take a little stroll -- to Yosemite Valley.

He hopped a ferry to rural Oakland, skirted the vast wetlands of the San Francisco estuary, hoofed it over bucolic Pacheco Pass, marveled at the vast flower fields of the Central Valley on the way to Snelling, borrowed a horse somewhere along the way, scuffed along dirt roads through the foothills to Coulterville, and arrived in Yosemite May 22, beating the first RVs with plenty of time to spare.

Today, Peter and Donna Thomas, a Santa Cruz couple with a long interest in California's mountains and wildflowers, planned to set out on roughly the same 300-mile route, altered as necessary to get past the freeways, housing developments, irrigation canals, factories and industrial-scale farms that have popped up since 1868.

It's apparently the first time anyone has tried to reconstruct Muir's first cross-state trek in California, a mostly forgotten journey at a time when his main interest was plant life. The trip would set the stage for his much more famous explorations of Yosemite and Sierra geology, which he recorded in "My First Summer in the Sierra" and other famous writings.

"We're paralleling his route," Peter Thomas said. "We want to get a sense of California as he saw it, moving at a human pace."

The Thomases are longtime artists who work in the medium of books, producing hand-bound, limited-edition volumes, often featuring Donna's watercolors and Peter's handmade paper, including several on the Sierra and other California nature topics.

The couple hope the Muir project will generate more than another art book for collectors -- although such a book, based on their original maps and drawings, will be part of the agenda.

After a year of research and scouting trips, the couple see an opportunity to knit together public walkways such as the Bay Trail and Guadalupe River Trail, along with Henry Coe State Park and various other open spaces, into a modern-day version of a Muir-style "Trans-California Ramble."

They've gotten one small grant, and have the support of the Sierra Club and Muir historians, but it's really a homespun project whose success is hardly guaranteed.

It's clearly a difficult route, harder in many respects than the famed John Muir Trail -- a clearly marked wilderness route in the High Sierra, which hundreds of people traverse every season.

"Obviously, California was a much different place then," Peter Thomas said, noting that Muir walked a year before the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad -- and generations before automobiles, factories and freeways made "rambling" long distances, on foot, seem unfortunately quaint.

Undaunted, Thomas said the scene nowadays has its own kind of appeal.

"There's a lot of pleasure seeing modern landscapes, too," he said. "The point is to look closely and try to appreciate what you see."

There's plenty of frustration as well, as they experienced recently when trying to find a way across a no man's land of artificial levees, fences and power lines blocking their way from Hayward to the historic Alviso community in the South Bay.

Looking out over the marshy flatland, Donna Thomas spied where the public trail ought to pick up again and figured it would be easier to just wade ahead, rather than walk way around on city streets.

"Public access is a big aspect of this," she said. "We didn't realize access was going to be so difficult."

Planning for their Muir walk, the Thomases have been denied passage already by some private landowners whom they contacted for permission ahead of time. So, for now, parts of this Muir "ramble" may include the rumble of big trucks along busy highways.

Historians have no detailed journals from Muir covering his early period in California, but he did set down a narrative account, "Rambles of a Botanist Among the Plants and Climates of California," four years after his trek.

Accompanied by a British acquaintance he apparently met on the steamer, Muir seems to have been bewitched by the richness of the plant life he found all along the way. Even in 1872, he was contemptuous of those who hurried too quickly through this idyllic California scene, "each traveler voluntarily compacting himself into the fastest cartridge of car and coach, as if resolved to see as little as possible."

"But we had plenty of time," Muir noted, "and proposed drifting leisurely mountainward, via the valley of San Jose, Pacheco Pass, and the plain of San Joaquin, and thence to Yosemite by any road that we chanced to find; enjoying the flowers and light, camping out in our blankets wherever overtaken by night, and paying very little compliance to roads or times."

Now, of course, it's a little more complicated for through-hikers. Fortunately, technology is better, too.

The Thomases will be decked out in modern camping gear and will carry a cell phone connected to friends and their camper van, with credit cards for hotels -- unlike the simple bedroll and sack of flour Muir evidently relied upon.

"We each have our own challenges," Peter Thomas said.

Today, the couple planned to begin, as Muir did, by ferry from San Francisco, leaving on the 1:15 p.m. to Oakland, preceded by a noon sendoff ceremony at the Gandhi statue by the San Francisco ferry terminal.

They planned to stop several times along the way for public presentations on Muir and their project, including programs at the Alviso Public Library at 1 p.m. on Saturday; the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose at 2 p.m. next Sunday; Henry Coe State Park on April 15; the Delhi Historical Society on April 20; and the Coulterville Historical Society on April 29.

Assuming they make it, the walking phase of the project ends May 13 with a talk at Yosemite Lodge.

Muir historians are among those hoping the couple succeed.

"This is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Muir's journey, look at the land, see how it's changed, and think about the writing Muir did," said author and Muir scholar Bonnie Johanna Gisel, curator of LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite since 2002.

"I don't know what they will find," she said. "The point is, you have to look. And you have to walk."

Follow the journey

Peter and Donna Thomas detail their route on their Web site www.johnmuir.org/walk. The site also includes selections of Muir's writings and eventually will carry the Thomases' journal entries as their trip progresses.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.